Emma has been in a cast for six weeks now. She broke her foot surfing and now uses the backyard hose as her shower to protect the cast….Her boyfriend Daniel, who carries a Medical Marijuana card, is a hot local surfer…

42 Responses to “Broken Foot”

now you’re cooking. are you shooting medium format film and digital along with these?

i’m not sure what to make of the photographs, other than that they are successful images formally — compositionally, elementally — and that they live up to what you would expect from a magnum photographer. and from david alan harvey.
early building blocks, i guess, which will fit nicely into the collection you’re building over these next few weeks/months of your trip.
does the lack of her top and his edgy behavior make us want to look at these? those male burn readers will certainly appreciate the nudity; those who dream of a positively priapian bong (schwing!) can dig daniel’s jacked pipe. but both the shower and the smoker don’t seem, to me at least, to be gratuitous, they seem authentic…
i’m rambling, i don’t have the writing gift others here trot out… but… well… enuf!

Kind of interesting as a California-way-of-life photo, presuming it’s not totally posed and she really does hose off like that regularly in the back yard, which is not unusual for people returning from the beach. The finger in the bikini bottom kind of ruins it though, I think. Looks posed and a common pose you see in car repair shop calendars at that. Unless you’re going for that 70’s biker magazine look, in which case it’s a different kind of interesting.

But I think those two photos show that a California way-of-life essay done right could be worthwhile. At least that white dope smoking beach going California way-of life. Of course it’s been done a lot, but I haven’t seen it updated recently to reflect the changes evident in the bong guy photo.

I didn’t see that one coming…Makes me think why you are posting these.
Family wise you have shown us the traditional….safe, good, wholesome….now it seems you are entering the danger zone. Is this part of the “Edge” you are talking about?
I mean, I’m thinking book wise…”Family drive”
Safe, wholesome…not cliche but wholesome….and now this…i’m confused…in a good way of course!

Having followed DAH for many years, were I to see the photo of the girl without knowing photographer, I’d never have guessed it was taken by DAH. It does not follow his usual style. Likewise, there is something a bit off sylistically in the second shot. Perhaps it is simply a matter of shooting with unfamiliar cameras. I’m very much looking forward to the upcoming shots as a rhythm for the trip is established. They will be great as always. The book will be fantastic.

Don’t be ridiculous. The human body, especially in its reproductive capacities, is evil, filthy, disgusting, nauseating, vile, sinful, corrupt, and yet somehow strangely alluring. If it wasn’t, what would be the point of sex? You might as well go and eat potato chips.

3. I don’t know about you, but if I were a Buddhist I might object to the whole idea of the Buddha being just one toke over the line.

I don’t know.
The nudity,for some, gives the pic its ‘edge’ but had she been standing there in shorts
and a shirt then we’re left with a pretty unremarkable image.
So,to borrow from Akaky, does one simple element take the image, “one toke over the line”
and move it from the mundane to art?

“Art can be enhanced by the lure of the “forbidden” — in-your-face and yet untouchable …”

There is nothing “forbidden” about nudity. Nudity and even porn, in 2012, is common, available to anyone, anytime, on the Internet. Any 17 year old boy can see a million nude women on the Internet, 24/7. if he wants. It’s nothing special.

As for this photo, it seems a little unlikely that she can only shower in the back yard because of her cast. It seems to me it would be as easy to shower inside as out. She obviously isn’t worried about getting it wet. Besides, the cast is removable. Looks kind of hokey to me.

Would you acknowledge that art and pornography are different entities, for the most part?

Would you agree that a society that in major part has a puritanical view of nudity and the body, yet is the largest consumer of pornography, especially in conservative regions, is drawn toward the “forbidden” ?

Jim, yes, pornography is common and boring, yet omnipresent, and its existence is owed to the puritanical and therefore inherently forbidden and “dirty” understanding of the human body. Without such an implication (as even shown in this thread) for even a fun and innocent image like the one above, such partial nudity would receive no special notice, and would be OK to view, even in mixed company, in work places and libraries, wherever personal internet viewing is deemed OK.

i am not going to argue for or against these totally documentary images…they just literally happened before me…however, you can never say if this or if that then it would be “ordinary”..any photograph is only special because of some tiny tiny thing that if it were not there, a “photograph” it would not be..right? i mean if the Steve McCurry most famous photo of all time , the Afghan girl had brown eyes instead of bright blue/green would he still have the same photo? no for sure not…if it were not for the green eyes it would be just another 105mm head shot…yes? but that IF is only an IF…she DID have green eyes , and my girl showers like this everyday in the back yard…however i make no case for it as “art”….does have something going though, and i do not mean because of partial nudity….for me the partial nudity ONLY works at all because of her broken leg…that is only reason i published this….

we are not traveling through Iowa..i already shot a lot in Iowa last year…my parents culture…but the reality is we are never going to even get out of California any time soon….laundry and fedex day today and we have our first workshop student joining us for three days….anything could happen…..

Speaking of which, if there’s any one element in these two pictures that strikes me as a bit jarring, it’s neither the semi-nudity nor the placement of the buddha sculpture (I do know people who would be offended by the latter, but I don’t actually know anyone who would be offended by the former… maybe they exist, but Jim’s labeling this ‘NSFW’ is clearly a red herring)… it’s the fact that the bong and that little jar of whatever are resting on the playing surface of the pool table… none of the serious pool players I know would permit that in their house.

I’ve been thinking about it all day and have come to think of it as a very good photo. Intellectually, it makes me question the importance of intent. My first thought was that I either liked it or didn’t based on the photographer’s intent. The finger in the bikini is such a common tactic for titillation. Was that done intentionally to titillate? Or was it some kind of meta, or ironic, comment? Or entirely unintentional. Earlier, the answer mattered.

Now though I’ve come around to the thought that it’s just a very good photo regardless of the intention. Technically, it’s very good how the perspective is slightly raised almost as if the camera is casting the shadow. The triangle formed by the hose, shadow and woman is visually fascinating as well. And I love the fence. It looks like something Jeff Wall would do. Doesn’t look like much at a glance, but contains many possible layers of meaning.

“but I don’t actually know anyone who would be offended by the former… maybe they exist, but Jim’s labeling this ‘NSFW’ is clearly a red herring…”

Sidney, they exist, which is something I know from personal experience. Context is all and if you’re working on someone else’s computer that someone else wants to know that you’re doing the work you’re supposed to be doing and not looking at photographs of shirtless women. And now that you’ve brought up red herring…

When I was a boy, my father went through a bad stretch where he could not find work anywhere. That was in 1967, and he worked maybe fourteen weeks out of the entire year. I don’t remember the reason why my father couldn’t find work that year, assuming I ever knew it, and my father’s not around to ask anymore, assuming he’d tell me if I asked; for such an otherwise gregarious man, my father could be remarkably close-mouthed about some subjects. My father did, however, take his paternal responsibility to keep us clothed and fed seriously, and a good thing too, because his brood of four growing boys was perpetually hungry, and to complicate life even further, my mother was pregnant with the youngest brother for the last part of that annus horribilis.

But he did keep us fed. That year we stuffed ourselves with spaghetti, which I didn’t mind so much, and with fish, which I minded muchly. The brothers and I stuffed our faces with tuna fish sandwiches and canned salmon and sardines and more tuna fish sandwiches and more canned salmon and more sardines and breaded fish sticks when we got bored with tuna fish sandwiches and canned salmon and sardines, which occurred about as often as we ate tuna fish sandwiches and canned salmon and sardines with breaded fish sticks to break the boredom of eating—you get the drift. Please allow me to point out here that the ability of breaded fish sticks to break the monotony of a diet based on tuna fish sandwiches and canned salmon and sardines is minimal to the point of nonexistence, despite the best efforts of my mother to convince us to the contrary. The result of this frenzy of forced fish feeding was to convert what might otherwise have been a mild dislike for seafood into a full-scale loathing of all that comes from the sea. I don’t even like going to the beach because I know there’s fish in the water. That’s right, people, just in case you didn’t know this, there’s fish out there and you are swimming in the same stuff they move their bowels in. You may enjoy the idea of swimming in a big hole filled with undrinkable water and fish feces, there’s no accounting for tastes, after all, but I don’t, not by a long shot.

I bring this bit of family trivia up here because I am sure that the whole country is about to get a fish dinner and we are going get the dinner whether we want it or not. And not just any fish, either. Yes indeed, all of us here in this our Great Republic are about to chow down on more red herring than any one human being knows what to do with, red herring served in more ways than anyone ever thought possible. Why is that, you ask? Because it is an election year here in the best of all possible worlds and the former junior senator from Illinois has a problem. He wants to be the leader of the Free World for another four years—it is, after all, a good way to bring one’s golf game up to par—but it seems he may have some difficulty convincing the citizenry to return him to his current office. I am not sure why this is so; at best, the newspapers and the television news channels treat the public’s reluctance on the matter as something terribly unseemly, as if someone had brought a pitcher of margaritas to a meeting of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and so they try to avoid talking about it at all, and, at worst, they become very angry when someone brings it up more than once in polite conversation. From the few hints I’ve managed to pick up here and there, it would appear that somewhere along the line our Illinois Incitatus has acquired a public record, and that no matter from what angle you choose to look at it, this public record is less than completely flattering.

I must admit that I could scarcely credit this bit of information when I first heard it. The Current Occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington D.C. 20500 has made a career out of not having a record, any kind of record. As far as anyone can tell, he arose from the waves of the sea off Hawaii a half-century ago like a Polyindokenyankansanesian Aphrodite, except Aphrodite had nicer legs, and since then nothing much has happened to him that’s any of anyone’s business except his. To make sure things stay that way, all his relevant personal records are in a bomb-proof safe tucked under his mattress and that this mattress has its own Secret Service detail, a platoon of New York Times editorial writers, and a battalion of the 82nd Airborne Division stationed nearby to lend the Treasury agents a hand in case someone tries to get a copy of his fifth grade report card. The secret of whether or not he plays well with others is obviously more important than such mundane matters as the identity of the Pakistani doctor who helped us find a mass murderer of Americans, but then, it’s all a question of priorities, isn’t it?

No, records were always someone else’s problem. If you were a Republican with a less than perfect marital record and you were running for office against Chicago’s own boy wonder [Wow, he said Chicago! He said boy! How racist is that?!], you could fully expect that the newspapers would demand access to your sealed court records—enquiring minds want to know, after all—that some judge who owes his job to the Cook County Democratic Committee would unseal those records, purely in the interest of the people’s right to know, you understand, and that the newspapers would then splash the gory details of your divorce all over their front pages, with special emphasis given to the more salacious bits. Yes, unsealed records are a great thing; they make life so much easier and allow One to concentrate on finding new and more efficient ways of delivering platitudes piled high with generalities, while the Republican does his best to convince the electorate that he is not some kind of wife-beating pervert.

So the problem that Our Leader seems to face, other than his opponents this time around being married to their first wives, which renders the always shovel ready project of digging up dirt on them that much harder, is that he has done something other than play golf and vote present in the four years that he has lived in the Potomac slough of despond. I can’t imagine what he could have been thinking; a man this careful not to have a record anyone could check would hardly be so dumb as to do something that someone would notice him doing, but people tell me that this is not the case. There is, and stranger things have happened, although I can’t think of any right off the top of my head, an actual record that people know about. Well, I was gobsmacked, as my sainted grandmother used to say. Not only did he do something, but a lot of people don’t like what he did, and hence all that red herring he will have to peddle. Yes, America is in for red herring for the soup, the salad, the main course, and probably dessert as well, because talking about seafood is a lot more interesting than talking about whatever it is he’s been doing besides golfing these past four years. You can take that to the bank, as my sainted grandmother didn’t used to say, largely because she didn’t trust banks. Bon appetit, everyone!

AKAKY: What do you think?

AKAKY IRL: You probably shouldn’t have done it. This place always strikes me as being full of Democrats and Democrats don’t like to be reminded that not everyone is a Democrat, unless you’re dead. All dead people are Democrats, for some reason or another. The dead even outnumber African Americans when it comes to the percentage of voters in the Democratic party. I’ve always wondered why that is.

i think you have to re read some of what i wrote before…Family Drive does not mean all portraits of families….it means i am on a family drive…again, based on my childhood family album which included family portraits of course but also what we saw and lived around home and away….showing work as i shoot is risky because easy for some here to quickly jump to conclusions when all i am doing is sketching and playing….i would not even attempt at this point to give you an exact structure…thinking layout and design and final editing while shooting is simply not the way i work..right now i am just living it and shooting what is most immediately around me…

these are for sure “straight shots”…i doubt you will see my “style” in any part of this book upcoming…this i shot with the GX1 which is an easy point and shoot and very similar to my GF1…so no camera this situation seemed to be best done straight up…and the Family Drive book i hope will never look as any kind of “professional coverage”…the point of this project is to look very much the scrapbook…unadorned in every way….

my father loved to take us on drives. oddly this is the first I’m thinking of my own. His favorite thing was to be somewhere new and get us as lost as possible. I would lay down in the floor boards out of fear. Makes me laugh to think about it. Well, his actual favorite part was the finding our way home again after. ANd he would always point it out ..no matter how lost we were we would always find our way home. I’m sure I felt much more lost than he knew us to be. Now no more floorboards for me and I cherish it when I have time to get lost again.